Did Hillary hand-pick Trump so she could beat crackpot come Nov.?

It’s an interesting conspiracy theory – put forth by wishful thinkers who have far too much free time on their hands.

 

GOP responsible for Trump, not Dem plotters

Donald Trump is a political plant – as in someone the Democrats (namely Hillary Clinton herself) set up to win the Republican presidential nomination for the Nov. 8 elections so as to ensure a Hillary victory.

AFTER ALL, THE only way that Clinton could overcome all the baggage brought about by her husband, Bill, and all the ideologues who are convinced she’s the ultimate witch-with-a-B who will steer this country in a permanent liberal direction, is to have a lunatic so far out on the fringe as an opponent that real people couldn’t possibly take him seriously.

Hence, we get Donald Trump instead of any of the 17 other people who campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination during this year’s primary election cycle.

But it is a theory I have a hard time taking seriously. Namely because I don’t think Hillary or any other Democratic operatives would be capable of pulling off something on such a grand scale as this.

I think if Trump weren’t serious about seeking the nomination, then he would not have been capable of drawing the support of that segment of our society that is determined to craft the Republican Party into a mechanization in their own ideological image, then use it to impose their authority over our society as a whole.

FOR ALL THOSE Republicans who can’t quite get their minds around the fact that they’re going to be nominating Trump to represent them come November when they gather later this summer in Cleveland, perhaps they need to realize just how much they have lost control of their political party.

Does Hillary have it in her to handpick opponent?

The Republican brand has come to mean a certain rigid ideological leaning, and also one that views urban life in this country as some sort of disease that threatens to spread from sea to shining sea.

It is the political party of rural America, so to speak. One that goes out of its way to make sure certain people know they don’t really fit in – and should not get too comfortable in this country because their time for removal will come!

Which is totally in line with much of the rhetoric that Trump is spewing these days while going from place to place and trying to talk himself up as a serious candidate for U.S. president.

IT’S NOT A grand conspiracy by opponents to undermine the Republican Party in this country. If anything, it is the end result of the trends that have been taking over the one-time Party of Lincoln for decades.

This is what Republican partisans have done to themselves – either through their apathy or, in some cases, active seeking of ideologically tainted support. The people within the Republican Party who are now trying to concoct last-minute schemes intended to deprive Trump of the GOP presidential nomination are seriously delusional themselves.

Perhaps more so than Trump himself if he seriously thinks any of his nonsense-talk about walls along the U.S./Mexico border will ever come true, or any of the other schemes he has brought up to push an isolationist and xenophobic vision of what this country ought to be about.

Then again, the kind of people to whom such a rant would appeal probably are gullible to believe that a conspiracy could be hatched to deprive them of a chance to have a president sympathetic to their desires.

PERHAPS THEY THINK such actions are possible because of the one known case where it seems a president was able to pick  his opponent with the idea of running against someone too weak to take seriously.

Latest conspiracy downright Nixonian!

That would be 1972 and Richard Nixon, who ultimately ran against Democrat Ed Muskie after other, more credible Democrats managed to collapse during the primary cycle. Do we really think that Hillary Clinton somehow concocted her own yet-to-be-discovered “Watergate” scheme to steal the presidency?

It’s just a little too nonsensical to take seriously.

Then again, so is much of what is taking place during this particular election cycle – one that is managing to develop credibility retroactively for all of the stupid political trash talk that took place in previous campaign years.

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Toi gives up present electoral aspirations so she can have a political future

If I lived in the Illinois Second Congressional district (I’m just outside it in the Illinois First), I probably would have voted next week for Toi Hutchinson.

HUTCHINSON: She's gone

In my dealings with her, she has come across as a responsible official with a sense that not only does her legislative district (south suburban and parts of rural Will and Kankakee counties) have to benefit, but other districts should as well.

WE ALL BENEFIT when we’re doing well and getting something we desire. There are those who mock her as the creator of the “pole tax” (the fee charged to people who attend strip clubs to raise money for domestic abuse programs), but I think we need more people like her in public office.

That’s my opinion. But it really doesn’t matter now, because Hutchinson, the state senator from Olympia Fields, formally gave up her Congressional campaign on Sunday.

She went so far as to say she’ll back the bid of former state Rep. Robin Kelly of Matteson – who has her own qualifications for the post and should now be thought of as the front-runner in next Tuesday’s Democratic primary special election to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr. (the man whose “big crime” was using campaign contributions to buy himself a load of junk that once belonged to people like Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

There are those who want to believe that recent news reports about how Hutchinson put her mother on the campaign payroll (I don’t know if she actually did work for her money) is a scandal that would have dogged her chances of winning.

THERE ALSO IS the fact that the same people who have been trashing congressional candidate Debbie Halvorson as some sort of outrageous “gun nut” because the National Rifle Association hasn’t demonized her in the same way they have Kelly’s record as a legislator were planning a new round of campaign advertisements for the final week of campaigning that would have given Hutchinson the same treatment.

KELLY: The new frontrunner?

Although what has caught my attention about the campaigning is the silent sniping that has been directed at Hutchinson. Kelly campaign types seem to think that their candidate ought to be the frontrunner, and that Hutchinson (who is 16 years younger) ought to wait her turn. Even though I wonder if Kelly was such a nondescript legislator that most people had never heard of her until this campaign cycle began.

Why do I suspect that if Halvorson, a Crete resident, former member of Congress looking for a comeback, and the only white person seeking to represent the majority African-American district, would have put Hutchinson on the line as the spoiler if a white lady had really wound up getting the congressional seat.

After all, Hutchinson was once Halvorson’s chief of staff back when Debbie was a member of the Illinois state Senate. And it is Hutchinson who holds Halvorson’s old legislative seat.

PERSONALLY, I HAVE heard and seen enough to know that this campaign cycle has created tensions that have torn at the Halvorson/Hutchinson ties. But too many political observers are more than willing to believe a good conspiracy tale.

Toi Hutchinson selling out black people to benefit her one-time political patron? It could be a tag that could very well stick. Which could result in a targeted effort to dump her from her state Senate post in the 2016 election cycle, and to ensure she could never run a credible campaign for any political post again.

Hutchinson herself indirectly addressed that issue when issuing her statement Sunday that confirmed the end of her current campaign. “I am simply unwilling to risk playing a role going forward that could result in dividing our community at a time when we need unity more than ever,” she said.

Stepping down now could allow the Kelly backers to gradually forget exactly what alleged role they were willing to lambast Hutchinson with. She might be forgiven.

HECK, I’VE HEARD some speculation that Hutchinson could be on the Democratic slate of candidates who run for statewide office in 2014 (Treasurer Toi?).

Say what you want about the improbability of the chances of her actually winning the post. But it probably sounds like a much more attractive future for Hutchinson than a second-place finish on Feb. 26 – and a “bulls eye” on her back come the future.

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End of the world? We can't be so lucky

Where do you read the date Dec. 21, 2012 in this?

If the conspiracy theorists (a.k.a., tin foil hat wearers, paranoid wackos) are correct, this is the last piece of copy I ever will write.

For the day has finally arrived on Friday that our society, our planet, our very sphere of existence, will come to an end.

FOR ALL I know, I wasted my time writing this, because you won’t be in any position to read it.

But I did take the time to write it, because I fully expect you to have plenty of time to read it. Along with all the other thoughts I plan to express during what remains of my life. Which I don’t expect to end anytime soon!

In short, I have always found a certain level of absurdity to those people who actually take seriously the idea that many centuries ago, the Mayans (one of the societies that have melded into the modern-day Mexicans) predicted that our world would end as of Dec. 21, 2012.

Of course, the people who interpret those round Mayan (whose own demise as a separate people came long ago) calendars to come up with Friday’s date are probably the same ones who can’t really read those Egyptian hieroglyphics. So we really don’t know much of what all those pharaohs of old were thinking.

BESIDES, IT WAS never really clear to me exactly what is supposed to happen Friday that will bring our society to its demise.

Earthquakes? A massive meteor smashing into our planet to knock it off its orbit just enough that it becomes uninhabitable?

And how long will it take? Will we suddenly just cease to exist? Or will it be one of those things that is nothing in the overall scheme of time, but seems like an eternity to us?

Which means that when we are still alive and thriving come 12:01 a.m. Saturday, the conspiracy theorists among us will probably come up with some picayune event that they say proves the truth of their beliefs – and that the end of the world has begun.

PERSONALLY, THERE WOULD be one advantage to having the end of the world at hand – we wouldn’t have to listen any longer to these paranoid people with their doomsday predictions. Because it’s not like they have some sort of secret rocket ship that will allow them to escape the demise of Planet Earth.

The idea of people who want to believe that one of those “X-files” movies gave their paranoid delusions credibility (by claiming that David Duchovny’s “Fox Mulder” character found the evidence that our government knew about the reality of Dec. 21, 2012 and was deliberately covering it up as part of a plot to hide the reality of extraterrestrial life) is something I could do without.

In fact, reading back that last sentence and what was forefold in that film shows just how absurd all this rhetoric is.

Because that film’s storyline is about as absurd as the reality espoused by the individuals who really believe that Friday has any real significance. Personally, the only significance to this date is that this weblog made it to the five-year mark in its existence.

BUT IF THIS date truly is the “end of the world,” then what’s the point? Somehow, I doubt the content of this weblog will be the one aspect of life on this planet that survives to be found by some future concept of life in this universe.

Which means that my real point is to mock the doomsday predictions, particularly in that no one followed the lead of “Dr. Strangelove” and came up with an underground bunker containing 10 women for each man to protect us!

Even that schpiel that computers would crash en masse on Jan. 1, 2000 had a tiny bit of truth to it – in that computer software can be so temperamental at times that nobody really knows what triggers a crash.

In reality, I expect Friday to be as uneventful a day as that one was (so uneventful that I can’t even recall what I did). Although it will be ironic for those people who pass away on Friday – because it WILL be the end of life as they knew it.

AND JUST IN the oft-chance that something cataclysmic does occur on Friday, I’ll leave you with R.E.M. and their song, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I feel fine).”

It will probably be the only time in my life that I don’t find that song completely annoying to listen to.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: This commentary also will be published at The South Chicagoan, a younger sister (by three months) weblog of this site.